A conversation with a Mumbaki

I hop on a jeepney at 8:45am and drive an hour to Legawe. One of my advisers, Mani Dulawan, wants to introduce me to a mumbaki, a native priest who lives in town. Though they’re sort of a dying breed, the bakis, as they are commonly called, are necessary for almost every Ifugao ritual. Similar to the African griots, the baki have memorized the oral traditions, stories and lineages for the community they belong to.

Soon after I arrive in Legawe, Mani and I take a tricycle to the baki’s house and find his daughter, probably around forty or so, outside.

“What’s your name?” Mani asks her.
She is short and stocky. With her short hair, baggy t-shirt and shorts, I could have confused her for a man. “Diana,” she says.
“Ah. In Greek mythology,” Mani said, “Diana is the goddess of the moon.”
I’m always impressed with Mani’s cultural knowledge—he’s 72, looks 50 and is considered an expert on Ifugao culture. Somehow he knows a little about everything.

Diana tells us that her father is performing a sickness rite over at a family member’s house, and offers to take us there. The three of us pile in a tricycle with another man and make the one kilometer journey to the house.

“My father is always busy,” Diana says. “There are very few mumbaki left and he has to perform rituals every day.” She tells me a bit about her family; she is one of eight brothers and sisters, and the only one not married. That, combined with her short hair and boyish appearance, make Diana, a virgin goddess, an appropriate name for her somehow.

“Has anyone in your family studied to be a mumbaki also?” I ask.
She shakes her head and smiles. “No—my father speaks deep Ifugao when he does the prayers. I know a lot of the prayers that he says but I don’t know what they mean.”

“So does Christianity get in the way of anyone wanting to study the mumbaki way?” In many scenarios, it is the primary reason the mumbaki tradition does not get passed down. The Ifugao traditions are often dismissed as primitive, pagan, and in conflict with the church.

She shook her head again. “No, it’s just that the baki has to work all the time. There are only five baki for our whole region now and my father gets called all the time to perform rituals.”

I remember that the mumbaki don’t get paid; they are usually given a portion of the meat sacrificed for the ritual. So how does he make a living?

“It is good to continue the mumbaki tradition,” Diana says, responding to my thoughts, “but who will earn money for the family?”

We arrive at the house: a yellow, run down, two-story building. Several large boards lay haphazardly in the front yard, with one plank above them for us to walk over to get to the front porch. A group of men stare out from the slatted glass window panes; several more sit on the railing along the porch. They can’t take their eyes off of me. I must be quite the unexpected visitor.

Mani introduces me to Emilio Cabbigat, an older man whose face is kind, yet proud, and lined with wrinkles. A few inches over five feet, the baki stands with his shoulders relaxed; his deeply lined face does not indicate that this is any surprise, or anything unusual. As one of the most knowledgeable mumbakis in the region, I think he’s been interviewed before. Several of the men in the house bustle around to grab us peach colored plastic stools—we grab them and have a seat off to the side. Someone brings out a plastic jug full of water and another man brings out a bottle of baya (pronounced phaya), the native rice wine.

“Would you like some?” they ask me. I shake my head. I don’t drink, but I don’t want to offend anyone. It’s only 11am, but I know that drinking rice wine and gin is part of almost every ritual. Mani takes the cup and drinks a sip but leaves it mostly untouched—he’s a diabetic and he needs to be careful about drinking too much.

The baki, is too busy today to have a long meeting, so we decide to reschedule for a week from now. He asks me what I’d like to talk to him about. I tell him I’d like to know a little bit about the rituals he practices, the ones he used to, and what his thoughts are about the changes in Ifugao culture over the past 100 years. I’m also curious about his personal history. He starts to answer me right away.

“I became a baki in the late sixties. My father was a baki and he taught me.” The baki tradition is usually passed down through families. “But I was working for awhile, in the government and I had a furniture shop, so I didn’t work as a baki. Then in 1979, my wife got sick. I needed to perform a sickness rite on her, and so started practicing as a baki again. Now, I am so busy; I have to do rituals almost every day.”

He pauses and rubs his hand down his chin. “As for the changes…you know, it wasn’t until the early 1900’s that the Catholic priests came,” he says, “to try to convert us to their religion. They talked to us about hell, and how hell was fire and that if we did not accept the Lord into our hearts we would go to hell. They made people very afraid.” His face tightens and he raises his voice a bit as he speaks. “They told us that we needed to accept Jesus into our hearts so that we wouldn’t go to hell. They told us that we need to confess our sins so we wouldn’t go to hell. They told us that our Ifugao ways were evil.”

He almost shakes as he speaks. “So I asked the priest. I said, ‘What does it take to be a Christian?’ And he said, ‘You have to accept Jesus Christ into your heart.’ And I said, ‘Is that all? How will you know you’ve accepted Jesus Christ into your heart?’ And he said, ‘Well, you also have to go to church once a week to celebrate him with others.’ And I said, ‘And that’s it? That’s what you need to do?’ And the priest said, ‘Yes, that’s what you need to do to be a Christian.”

He shook his head and looked away, then looked back at me with intensity in his eyes. “And that’s why there’s so much corruption, why they can allow so many corrupt people in the government. Because they are all Christian, and if all you have to do to be Christian in their opinion is go to church once a week, then there will be plenty of corruption there. All those people in the government call themselves Christian but they lie to the people; they steal from the people. Even here, in Ifugao. But they go to church once a week and then it’s okay. If they were true Christians, they wouldn’t be accepted in the government, they would be kicked out; the other people wouldn’t like them. I know this, because it happened to me.”

I’m not sure if Emilio is Christian or not, but I know Mani is—he’s Evangelical. I assume that Emilio is, like every Filipino in the region.

He continues, “The Philippines is the only Christian nation in all of Asia, but we are the most corrupt nation in Asia as well. There is something missing.”

Mani smiles, and nods his head. We have talked before about how he’s found a balance between his Ifugao traditions, which he fights to keep alive, and his Christian beliefs as well. Yet these men are aware, like so many, of the corruption that has woven its way into every government office, both local and federal, in the Philippines. But for the Ifugao, who only recently (the last 50-100 years) embraced formal education and official government ruling, this corruption is something new, something foreign, something abhorrent to them—especially their elders.

“In Ifugao, it is a shame to steal,” Emilio says.

“I would rather kill myself or my accuser than to be called a stealer,” Mani said, “it is the highest crime.”

“But our politicians do it all the time,” Emilio says. “I used to work in the government, with the Department of Works and Transportation. I was a construction foreman. I would get a receipt from a government office. It would say, for example, that I had received 500 bags of cement. But I would only have 250. They would say, ‘sign here.’ But I would only see 250 bags. Someone was pocketing that money in the government and they wanted me to help them, to go along with it. But I wouldn’t sign. I would quarrel with the people. Because if something went wrong, I would get the audit and I would take the blame!”

This is not an uncommon practice—in fact, this is small scale corruption compared to the federal government abuses.

“So,” he says, “this is what frustrates me, our Ifugao ways are being lost. The children don’t care any more about our old ways. In the past, people never begged. You never abused your wife. You only married someone you really liked because it was unacceptable to be with another woman during your marriage. In the past, you never sat across from your sister, your 1st cousin, or your second or third cousin because that meant you had taken her as your wife. But now, young people do this all the time. They don’t care so much about our old ways. They think they are primitive.”

Mani pulls out a book he wrote about the oral traditions of the Ifugao. He has dedicated his life to getting Ifugao traditions, oral history and ethics taught in schools. His passion inspires me. I take the book he has in his hands and flip through it. Inside are well known myths and stories from the region.

“This is incredible,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re doing this. In the States, we have our indigenous people too, the Native Americans. And they lost a lot of their identity when we colonized them and took their lands. They lost their traditions and a sense of who they are. And now there’s a lot of depression among their people, a lot of grief and alcoholism because they don’t know who they are anymore.”

“Yes,” Mani nods, “we want to prevent that here.”

But I think about the young men back in Banaue. I think about the late nights down the street at the videoke bar, the drunken brawls, the screaming, the depression in their eyes. Who are they now? I think about the young women I meet who desperately want to live abroad, working as domestic helpers, as nurses—anything. I think about the general trend among the youth to leave anyway possible, whether through alcohol or by plane, and I wonder if these efforts will bear fruit. I wonder if the region will indeed experience a surge of cultural reclaiming, or if their world will go on evolving, their indigenous ways soon just a memory of the distant past.